Day 8: What's your inheritance, and how are you using it?

This post is from the 30-day reflective writing series I made for Academic Writing Month (November 2018). For background on the series and links to all the videos, visit this page. To turn on subtitles: On a computer, hover at the bottom of the video window to make the row of icons appear; click on the “settings” icon (which looks like a cog), and select “Subtitles.” On a phone, the “subtitles” icon is in the bottom right corner of the screen.

DAY 8 CONTENT SUMMARY:

How does your project build on foundational works of scholarship that established the assumptions, methodologies, driving questions, etc, that set the terms of the knowledge-building conversation you are now intervening in? The foundational works you think about in this reflection could be canonical texts published decades, centuries, or millennia ago, or the scholarship of superstars who are still alive and working today.

You can approach this question intellectually, hearkening back to our Day 2 question by focusing on the conceptual tool(s) you have inherited from those who came before you in your field, or you can approach the question relationally, using it as an opportunity to reflect on how you experience your relationship, real or imagined, with the foundational thinker(s) in whose tradition you are working.

For some of us, this question may invite a sense of gratitude toward predecessors with whom we see ourselves as being in a line of continuity, while for others of us, the question may evoke a sense of conflict or resistance if we see ourselves as iconoclasts ripping up our predecessors’ foundations in order to build something new. However we approach this question, it’s an opportunity to situate ourselves, as thinkers and as human beings, within a larger tradition of knowledge-building.

Podcast interview. Listen up in early 2019 if you like behind-the-scenes glimpses of academic entrepreneurs! I’ll be a guest on Tara McMullin’s What Works podcast. You can subscribe to my email updates to hear when the episode is released. In the interview, I share how I’m using real-time public interactions to develop ScholarShape’s ideas and methods.